Electronically verified elections

Russia's electronic voting system has a better track record than in many countries considered more developed.

In 1994, when the
Russian budget was more or less equivalent to that of New York City, the state
decided to begin development of the Automated State Election System (SAS).
Prior to the development of SAS, Russian electoral rolls were printed on
typewriters and ballot papers were hand-counted. In the 1993 elections, it took
election officials 12 days to count the votes. SAS, which took about a year to
develop and launch, was built on a foundation of Soviet technological
innovations, but some of the world’s leading IT companies, including HP,
Oracle, and Cisco Systems, also contributed.

"With the
creation of the Elections SAS, we became pioneers. And to this day, not a
single country in the world has a system like ours," said Mikhail Popov,
head of the Federal Center of Information Technologies under the Central
Election Commission of the Russian Federation, in a 2009 interview
with Rossiyskaya Gazeta. It’s possible that he is over-praising his
creation. But the SAS has served more than 20,000 election campaigns at various
levels without significant technological failures.

In 2009, Russian President
Dmitry Medvedev proposed an upgrade to the system. According to Medvedev, the
upgrade was necessary to enhance the transparency of the electoral process and
strengthen public oversight. Last year, a state program was launched
specifically to introduce electronic vote counting, establish a secure network
for data transfer and storage, and construct infrastructure for remote voting
via mobile phone for those who cannot make it to polling stations. This is
particularly important in Russia, where in some regions the closest inhabited locations
might be thousands of miles apart.

Many polling stations are
now equipped with webcams, so in theory, voters can watch the counting of votes
without leaving their computers. But the effectiveness of this measure is limited
by Internet penetration rates: According to Yandex, Russia’s most popular
search engine, just 40 percent of the voting-age population has access to the web.

One of the major
technical innovations that will be in operation for December’s State Duma
elections is an optical scan voting system. Voters can bring their ballots to
the scanner and a Russia-wide data network will record all the information from
it. Not only does this increase processing speed, but more importantly, it
prevents possible fraud at polling stations. If violations occur, there would
be documentary evidence to prove them. In previous elections, "ballot
stuffing" has been observed, although not a single fraud case has ever
reached the courts.

In many ways, the
Russian system is more sophisticated than its foreign counterparts. The
American system, developed by Diebold, consists of sensory terminals, also
known as e-voting machines. These are tablets that run on Windows and are connected
to the Internet by ordinary, unprotected wires. The system has been around for
about 10 years, during which time a number of scandals have occurred, most
notably in 2002 when the developer accidentally posted the system's codes and
scripts in open access.

The European system,
called E-Poll, is technically perfect, but it is being implemented slowly. In
France, for example, it is still a novelty. The matter is complicated by the
fact that municipalities have been asked to choose between several types of
machines that also have to be purchased using local funds, although subsidies
are available. The French authorities have acknowledged that they are still 10
years away from a fully electronic system. Meanwhile, tests have been suspended
in Spain and Belgium, while in the UK, electronic systems are being developed
separately for each region of the country.

Some of Russia’s
fellow BRICS members have had success with automated voting, but even here
there are challenges. India is a pioneer in the automation of elections. The
country tested prototypes as early as 1989. However, the huge population of the
country combine with the poor development of the Internet in rural areas and a
shortage of computer systems have made progress slow. This is also true of
Brazil, which is also considered a leader among developing economies in the
creation of automated voting systems. Where it is implemented, the Brazilian
system allows for approximate results within one hour. Russia’s Central
Election Commission secretary Nikolai Konkin even visited Brazil in 2010 to
study the Brazilian system. But at a recent seminar in Russia, representatives
of the Electoral Commission of Brazil noted that they can learn a lot from the
Russian experience, most importantly the challenges of using an automated
system across a large country that contains many sparsely populated areas.